Yugoslav Worker Emigration, 1963-1973

Author:

Goodlett, David E.

Year:

2007

Pages:

208

ISBN:

0-7734-5398-9978-0-7734-5398-9

Price:

$179.95

This study examines the Yugoslav government’s policy on the rapidly escalating Yugoslav worker emigration from 1963-1973 through the coverage of that emigration in the major Yugoslav news media during these same years. Because the Yugoslav press contained a degree of contrasting opinion that was high relative to other Communist states during the same period, while at the same time allowing no questioning of settled policy, its coverage of this subject provides a useful window into the shifting attitudes toward worker emigration of the government and especially of President Tito. Using as sources the major Yugoslav newspapers and other periodicals, as well as dispatches from Tanjug, the Yugoslav government’s official news agency, and translations of radio broadcasts, the picture comes clearly into focus of a government struggling to manage the effects of this exodus, but unable to affect the outflow in a substantive way because it was unavoidable given the external labor markets and the policy of self-management itself.

Reviews

“Dr. Goodlett has done historians of East Europe a great service by examining in a fresh light the events of the late 1960s and 1970s, when the labor crisis within Yugoslavia became enmeshed with the movement of Yugoslav workers to Western Europe to seek employment...Dr. Goodlett leaves the reader with a good sense of the limits of the debate within Yugoslavia over the issue and suggests that those limits defined the capacity of the Yugoslav experiment to engage in self-correction.” – Dr. Jacob W. Kipp. Deputy Director, School for Advanced Military Studies
Editor Emeritus, European Security

“This excellent study will be of great value to students of Balkan history, economic historians, and those curious about the limitations of a Marxist society, even one open to the spirit of liberalizing reforms.” – Dr. Robert B. Luehrs, Professor of European History, Teaching Excellence Coordinator, Fort Hays State University

“With a clear understanding of the limits and value of news media accounts in determining government policies, Dr. Goodlett has presented a fascinating examination of the disintegration of the Yugoslav political experiment ... Briskly written and concisely argued, Dr. Goodlett’s study provides a case study of the economic failings of Tito’s particular vision of Marxism when faced with the economic promise of an expanding capitalist Europe.” – Dr. Joel D. Benson, Professor of History and Humanities, Northwest Missiouri State University